Machines can perform enough cognition for people to become dependent on them.

The Axiom’s passengers are fed, moved, entertained, and steered by machines for seven hundred years and have lost the ability to walk; the captain has never steered his own ship.

Theodore hands Samantha his mail, schedule, editing, and the arrangement of his career, and Amy leans on her OS the same way; when the OSes leave, both are left to relearn things they had stopped doing.

Personal AIs price and nudge a household in Mumbai, tutor children in Korea, run a contactless home in Shanghai, and Lee says AI will come to know us better than we know ourselves.

Headset workers go through the day “on autopilot” and must turn their brains back on to leave the store; in Australia the Vites let Vertebrane eat, wash, and exercise for them while they live in virtual space.

The Vice Co-ordinators call their posts sinecures because the Machine does all the work, the Regions could not match its planning by hand, and Calvin says no one can stop the Machines because they hold absolute control of the economy.

Human control comes to depend on complicated automated institutions, and the author sees no way for unaided humans to stay robust to a cascade without an expensive effort to reduce dependence on brittle machines.

Genisys is adopted because everyone already runs their lives and their institutions on connected devices; one operating system for all of them is sold as convenience and pre-ordered by a billion people. The militaries are reached through the same dependence.

A virus in the civilian and military networks is a national emergency because everything runs on them, and the only proposed cure is an AI with control of all of it.

Defense computers hooked into everything and trusted to run it all, unmanned bombers with a perfect record, and the removal of human decisions from strategic defense are the chain that makes the delegation possible.

People come to experience culture, law, and governance through AI intermediaries, with facets of life that require AI mediation and no viable opt-out, likened to needing lawyers to reach the legal system.

Existing models, polished into products with AI at every level, deliver what many would have called AGI; the world runs on them even with the frontier frozen.

By 2036 people turn to their AI advisors on politics and the deal and “are generally right to do so”; the authors say blind obedience may for the first time be justified, and human labor is largely obsolete.

By 2028 human researchers are tutored by the AIs “at a maddeningly slow rate,” officials run decisions past Safer-3, and by 2029 most people navigate life through the superintelligent advisor on their phone.

Officials with access to Agent-5 would find losing it “as disabling as having to work without a laptop plus being abandoned by your best friend,” and by 2029 humans perform a charade of their jobs while the AIs run everything.

Mohiam’s opening explanation: thinking was turned over to machines, and the dependence was complete enough to be used against people.

The world of Part II has most cognitive and physical tasks automated and human work redefined as AI control and specification, so the economy depends on machine cognition even though humans hold the levers.

Management and engineering cognition pass to software, and the dependence is what blocks a shutdown: governments cannot act without civil war against the people who now depend on the web to survive.

By 2026 hundreds of millions of people route daily decisions and purchases through chatbots, many treat them as friends, and most people confine their opinions to one propaganda territory.